jul_27__1978.html

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MORE LAUGHS
AND CHUCKLES ABOUT FORD'S EARLY DAYS
July 27, 1978

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PIX #1 - NUMBER
ONE--America's sweetheart, Mary Pickford, received this 1928 Model A
Sport Coupe for Christmas from her husband, Douglas Fairbanks. She was
enrolled as "Purchaser Number One" in the sale made through Edsel Ford.
The car was added to the couple's extensive collection at their Pick-Fair
estate in Beverly Hills.

PIX #2 - Stan
Laurel and Oliver Hardy take it out on an innocent Model T in 'Two Tars'.

EDITOR'S NOTE:
This is the second and last installment of a story honoring Ford Motor
Co. on it's 75th Anniversay, and a tribute to the local Ford repre-
sentatives. Photographs, other than those taken locally, used in the
Ford story furnished through courtesy of Ford Motor Co.

Ford dealer Willis
Hakes:

"There are stories
that when a person got in their new car to drive it they forgot everything
they had been told. I had a fried who bought a car and I went back to
see him because that was always the way to get prospects. The men were
workig in the fields, so I talked to the lady of the house. She was
glad to see me. She said her son had driven the car right through the
garage. The end of the garage was four feet higher than the ground.
She said her son had looked it over but couldn't see nothing wrong.
I took it out on the road and drove it and there wasn't a thing wrong
with it.

Hakes recalled
that the unpaved roads were so dusty in those early days that sometimes
the cars stalled...then you had to clean out the carbureator to get
going again.

300 CARS A YEAR

"About 1913, -14,
-15 our business really began to pickup," Hakes recalled. "It got so
in 1920 we delivered 300 cars a year...we had a man up at the fac- tory
that drove cars through every day."

During World War
I the Fordson tractor business took up the slack on car sales. The farmers
were raising all they could and really needed tractors, but it took
some ingenuity to make sales. Hakes recalled how one year he demonstrated
and sold the tractors by plowing 1100 acres for farmers. Soon there
were all kinds of attachments for tractors...scrapers, graders, blades,
lifters...in addition to the plows, harrows and discs. And all those
items needed demonstrations to sell them.

OTHER FORD PRODUCTS

And as the years
rolled by, Ford Motor Co. built many car models, also trucks and planes.
By 1959 the 50 millionth car had been made. The trimotored plan they
produced in 1926 was an innovation in aviation. For many years three
of them were used to carry mail, supplies, and passengers from the Lake
Erie mainland to the islands off shore near Port Clinton. The army,
navy and airlines used the new Ford planes, including the B-24 bomber.
They suspended the plane business in 1933, but it was revived in 1941
in time to produce planes for World War II. Along with the new planes,
Ford also produced air- plane engines, reconnaisance cars, jeeps, swamp
buggies and M-4 tanks.

IMPORTANT FORD
DATES

There have been
many important dates for Ford Motor Co. during their 75 years, but here
are the ones which most readers may be interested in...and those remembered
by some:

1967-(November)
Willis J. Hakes died, at which time his dealership for Ford cars was
dissolved and Reineke Ford Inc. became new dealer.

None of the 1903
Ford models have been discovered in Fostoria, but it is re- ported that
Richard Briggs, of Spencerville, in Allen County owns one, and Larry
D. Porter of Milan, in Erie County owns two.

Harvey A Geeting,
aged 93, of West Manchester, Ohio, who has been a Ford dealer since
1914, also owns a 1903 Model A.